I wanted to take the liberty of listing some of the common misconceptions that I run into in religious debate and wanted to bring a few of them up here and for us all to share our own misconceptions that we encounter, then discuss them perhaps:
Evolution:
Evolving from monkeys.
-We didn't evolve from monkeys, monkeys and humans share a common ancestor.
Random Evolution.
-Evolution was not random, it was due to non-random selection and occasionally random mutation.
Missing links.
-There are some missing links but are not significant as to completley satisfy the thinking of evolution deniers you would need the skulls of every consecutive generation of human beings and their ancestors in our evolution to satisfy them. Even then some would perhaps still deny evolution.
Dating methods.
-Some argue that dating methods are inaccurate not only to fossils but also extending this argument to geology, that the earth is around 4.5 billion years old. When in fact there are many dating methods and many of them point to the same age of the earth, and to fossils.
Physics:
The Big Bang and its point like existence (something from 'nothing')
-The universe did not come from nothing, all the universe existed as a 0-dimensional point in which its entirety as you see it today was contained.
'Who' created the universe?
-A common question asked by theists in particular, believing that 'intelligence' made the universe, this comes onto my point below:
What came 'before' the universe?
-Nothing as there was no time, all the dimensions came from the big bang in which there would have been no 'before' the big bang. A common analogy of this is asking what is north of the north pole.
I want to bring these up specifically because I personally encounter them all the time in religious debate. Now there are solutions to these questions that people often unaware of the answers bring up.
What are the misconceptions you encounter often? Are there any people are making about each other and not just scientific ones?